Internally on the Flex team, we’ve been talking about how to partition the new Flex 4 features within the existing Flex 3 SDK.  Flex 4 introduces new Buttons, CheckBoxes, etc that must live happily with components from Flex 3.  And, Flex 4 also introduces new “language” features, like the new states syntax. As an example, if we have two components called “Button” how do we refer to them?  How do we style them?  How do we maintain backwards compatibility?  

After literally months of deliberations, we decided on the current strategy of adding “Fx” to the new component names.  Not everyone liked this, but we felt it satisfied most of the issues we saw, from usability to readability to overall technical fit.  Trust me, these were not fun conversations.  I’m a member of the ARB group that helps decide these issues, and it was painful.  Very very painful.

Once we let loose the new versions of Flex 4, we heard from a very vocal segment of our existing user base that we were out of our minds.  A lot of people don’t like the “Fx” prefix for a number of reasons.  But one of the biggest complaints we heard was that we weren’t letting our users take part in these discussions.

Well, Matt Chotin got us all in a room, and we re-hashed the debate.  The major take-aways from that debate are now posted online.  If you feel strongly about these issues, please read over the document and add comments to it.  We’re nearing a decision, and we want to make sure we have as much feedback as possible.